I hadn’t intended to blog about the annual Bournemouth Beer Festival at all because I had agreed to go to it in a moment of distraction (while I was busy writing an essay or something).

Beer isn’t my thing.

In fact, drinking isn’t my thing. I don’t mean just alcohol. I mean the act of drinking any liquid at all. I am seldom thirsty and I don’t really enjoy drinking liquids when not thirsty because it’s unpleasant. (Like maybe trying to stuff a huge hamburger down your throat when you haven’t got an appetite.)

I do enjoy drinking tasty beverages when I’m thirsty or when I’m eating food at the same time, but drinking just by itself is a chore. Well, I can’t explain it adequately without veering off the point of this post, so you may just put this down on your ever-growing “Sheylara is weird” list.

The point of today’s post is something incomprehensible.

The beer festival was to start at 6:30 pm, so Piers’ friends had arranged to meet at a nearby bar at 6 pm, the reason being that they wanted to have a beer while waiting for the beer festival to start.

Huh?

This makes as much sense to me as someone, say, making a quick stop at McDonald’s half an hour before going to a buffet dinner. (Keeping in mind that the purpose of the beer festival is for people to drink as much beer as possible from a selection of 200 types of beer, within five hours.)

After being in England for a year, I have concluded that the Brits have an internal trigger that shuts down common sense whenever the word beer is mentioned.

Still, they are very lovable people. Despite the fact that beer isn’t my thing, (and also risking the ire of my orthodontist because my Invisalign aligners were sitting in my handbag instead of on my teeth for the whole five hours), I did enjoy myself very much.

It costs £5.50 to attend the beer festival. For that price, you get a beer glass (which you can take home), a beer guide and £1.50 worth of beer. The beers cost £1.50, £2 or £2.50 for half a pint.

You basically use your own glass all night and keep going to the counter to refill your glass after choosing the beer you want.

Because there are 200 beer descriptions in the beer guide, Piers couldn’t be bothered to read them. He was going to choose his beers randomly, so I offered to choose for him, which meant I got to taste more of the ones I wanted to try! And, if I didn’t like mine, I would swap with him! Haha.

The first beer I tried was called Blueberry Classic Bitter. It’s award-winning and I liked it, the word “like” being used very loosely here since I am not a beer person. You can smell blueberries when drinking it and the aftertaste it leaves is blueberries!

But the highlight of my night was actually the pasty which cost a cutthroat price of £3.50. But I would have bought another if I had room left in my stomach. It was so tasty, like a giant curry puff, and actually as filling as a full meal.

I enjoyed it so much that I had Piers buy us pasties for lunch today. Now I’m convinced that they are very, very filling.

Back to the beer fest.

Piers had two giant hot dogs which earned him a lot of flak from all his friends, none of whom ate a single thing all night.

When Piers appeared at our table with his first hot dog, his friend Jamie actually looked astounded and said, “What is this, man? This is a beer festival, not a food festival!”

I’m not sure if Jamie noticed the crowd around the snack stand all night, where people were queuing up to shell out £3.50 for a hot dog or a pasty.

I really don’t know if Piers and I are the weird ones, or his friends are. Just remember that his friends are the same people who went for pre-beer-fest beers.

(Piers and I actually didn’t go for that because I had to wait a bit for Iron Man to finish his 4-hour training so I could put Black Widow on her 4-hour training before leaving home.)

((That’s me playing Marvel: Avengers Alliance on Facebook. It’s a great game for which I willingly gave up 4 other Facebook games to play, cos it takes more time and I don’t have time to play everything.))

Anyway, when Piers appeared later in the night with his second hot dog (all nine inches long of it), I think his friends were quite ready to put a straitjacket on him. (But maybe they are the ones who need the straitjackets to keep them from overdosing on beer. Piers, on the other hand, just needs to be locked up in a room with his Xbox 360 so that he’ll leave me alone to play Marvel on Facebook.)

After a pint of beer and a bit, I had to change to cider for the rest of the night. There’s a small cider counter with about 20 different kinds of cider, which was lucky. They were sweet, therefore more pleasant to drink.

But I kinda wished I enjoyed beer because there were many really wicked sounding ones I wanted to try because they sounded cool or cute, such as Diablo IPL, Empire Strikes Back and Rabbit Punch. (I tried Diablo and it was horrible, like really strong and bitter.)

Like all parties, it got more fun as the night wore on and people had more beer in them. People start doing crazy things, don’t they? Such as breaking a pencil with one hand and trying to karate chop one of the halves into two again.

Here is a picture of Nick (on the right) holding out a shortened pencil in his hands and Lewis (on the left) helping Sarah perform a flying kick at the pencil.

I regret to inform viewers that a pencil was harmed during the photography.

But that’s life.

We move on from mourning the pencil to showcasing another bit of tomfoolery performed by the noteworthy Rich, whose life purpose is to prank people.

He was telling me how he had no qualms at all about walking up to a total stranger to have a chat for no reason at all, maybe to show that he’s very confident or something. Then, he proceeded to prove himself by suddenly dragging this bloke over to our table and making me pose for a photograph with him.

Apparently, he had told the bloke that I was the one who had sent Rich to get him to come over and have a photo with me. What a cheat!

Here’s Rich (on the left) and his victim, Alex, who turned out to be really nice; it was near closing and he had a whole stack of beer coupons left so he gave them all to us.

Not that anyone needed anymore beer, is my opinion.

It is probably a good thing that I don’t really enjoy beer. One can always do with fewer fattening vices in one’s life. I already have too many of such vices, as it is (cream, butter, chocolate, fried chicken…).

But I’ll probably go to the beer festival again, next year. The Brits may get really silly around beer, but I guess that makes them quite fun to be around with.

As long as they don’t come near my apartment to sing drunken songs in the middle of the night while I’m trying to sleep.

I was eating hot cross buns for breakfast today, so I sang the hot cross bun song to Piers, who was eating toast and bacon.

“Hot cross buns! Hot cross buns! One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns!” I sang.

He stopped eating his toast and bacon and gaped at me. “What on earth is that?” he managed to say past his stupefication.

I gaped at him in return. “What do you mean what on earth is that?! It’s the hot cross bun song!”

He just looked blank, or shocked, I’m not sure.

“How do you not know the hot cross bun song?” I said, “Do hot cross buns not come from England?”

“Yes,” he said, “But there isn’t a song! You must have made that up!”

“Also,” he protested, “They do not cost a penny each!”

Which is true. They cost about 20 pennies each at supermarkets (and 80 pennies for the ones we got because they are branded hot cross buns).

Still, Piers is so ignorant of his own culture. Here’s a video of the song in case you haven’t heard it, either. There are many different tunes for this rhyme, but this is the one I know.

I remember when I first visited England last year, Piers took me to the supermarket and bought up all the different kinds of breads. He would, for example, pick up some crumpets and go, “I love this,” and I would say, “I’ve never had it,” and he would say, “What!!! You must try it!”

So he bought hot cross buns, crumpets, bagels, muffins and crusty bread, and then tried to serve them all to me in one meal.

It’s silly, but it’s one of the things I love about him; He doesn’t mind being impractical for the sake of happiness, joy, laughter and gluttony.

He does mind very much, though, when I put his photos on my blog, but I don’t care, lol.

So, here’s another photo of him, holding his newborn niece.

Okay, another one…

LOL. I think that’s a funny one.

But enough.

Here’s one of me or he’ll be really mad at the injustice.

That’s about it for today, really.

But I don’t want to end this post with my photo, so here’s a photo of trees to round things up.

This is a famous street in England called Beech Avenue, which is a long straight road flanked on both sides by — wait for it — beech trees!

There are supposedly 365 trees on one side and 366 on the other side, one for every day of the year and the extra one for the days in leap years.

It’s quite a spectacular experience driving through this road and seeing the trees looming up endlessly.

Okay, that’s all. It’s dinner time and I must go. We’re going to have fish and chips from Chez Fred, which is really good.

There is, apparently, also a fish and chips song, but I think we’ve had enough of kiddy songs for the day. Kthxbye!

It’s been about three weeks since I recovered from chicken pox and I’m still catching up on school work while new ones keep pouring in relentlessly.

Last week, one of our lecturers assigned us yet another essay to our utmost horror, which we made sure to express very visibly on our faces.

She took one look at us and said, “What, are you all feeling overworked?”

“Yesssssssssss,” We chorused miserably.

Smiling, she said, “You don’t know what’s coming yet. Have you seen your seniors lately and noticed how frazzled they have been looking?”

Right. We really needed to know that.

The “seniors” she was talking about are just three months ahead of us.

Anyway, we have a three-week holiday coming up, during which time we have to complete two essays and one file, which will contain about 60-80 A4 pages of notes and drawings.

Like this:

Some holiday.

We have to do about 15 essays and 7 or 8 files within this one year. Whee.

As a result, I’ve had to let my blog pile up as well. I have a lot to blog about but no time to write them. Today, I’m taking a break from school work because I will have the holiday to catch up on everything, hopefully, lol.

Regardless, I am still enjoying the course. At times, I do want to pull out all my hair, like when slaving over all my assignments, but completing them gives me such a sense of achievement that I sometimes actually enjoy the work, which is hopefully not a sign of masochism.

It’s like people who enjoy going to the gym and torturing the hell out of their muscles, right? I think I kind of enjoyed that, too, when I was doing it, except during the moments when I wanted to murder my personal trainer so he will stop making me do more sets.

This is a bit complicated so let’s talk about something else.

In England, there are no coffee shops, hawker centres, food courts or random food outlets. There are only restaurants, pubs and supermarkets. Which means that people make their own lunches and take them to school or work. (You can buy refrigerated precooked meals in supermarkets but they mostly suck.)

This is something I am having a lot of trouble getting used to. In the beginning, I just made sandwiches, which seemed easiest, but then I very quickly got stark raving sick of sandwiches. I will literally go insane if I have to eat the same kind of food every day for even a week. I would rather starve, seriously.

Sometimes, my lunch looks like this because I have no time to prepare food or I can’t be bothered:

But that was before I found out that our school has a no nut policy because nut allergy is quite prevalent and can be deadly. (Just read in Wikipedia that, in England, 11 people are newly diagnosed with a peanut allergy EVERY DAY.)

No more Snickers or Picnic for lunch, which is a pity because I love them. However, I have many other nutless mini snacks to choose from, so that’s alright.

We usually eat in our classroom because the break room has no tables and is always crowded. It’s very fun to see what lunches people bring every day.

Kai brought a whole can of tomato soup last week, lol.

The bright side of having to prepare our own lunches is that I have an excuse to make some… uh… very essential purchases.

I tried to convince Piers that he needed cute lunch boxes and bags, too, because I sometimes prepare his lunches, but he refused to hear of it. Spoilsport. So we just got him some boring containers from Ikea.

So, now that I have lunch boxes, I can pack proper food like rice, pasta, couscous, or whatever. The lunch bag is to hold together a selection of mini snacks plus a banana.

Yes, bananas are very important because they help reduce/control/treat stress, depression, nerves, anemia, constipation, blood pressure, heartburn, morning sickness, ulcers, stroke, cancer, kidney disease, osteoporosis, vision loss and mosquito bites.

Yep, I just copied that from some website. BUT, oh my, bananas are so very amazing.

Anyway, I have so far visited two nurseries to clock my observation/teaching practice hours and have been delighted by my experiences with the children, even if most of them just involved me sitting in a corner and watching them.

Will share some stories next time when I have time to write another post. I will probably have enough material to write a book by the time I finish my 240 hours! Except I won’t have time to write it, lol.

Oh yeah, going back to Singapore for a week in April. Yep, sadly, that’s all the time I can spare in view of all the assignments we have.

Oh boy.

Piers pointed out to me today something funny that he saw on his Facebook feed.

There were my status updates where I was stressing about my essay, groaning about not having much time left to finish it. And then, on the same page, it also showed that I had been watching Prison Break on Netflix.

Now, this is a complete lie because, while I was toiling away at my essay, Piers was the one who was watching Prison Break on my Netflix account. Because my Netflix is linked to my Facebook, it auto-updated.

Stupid Facebook.

But it’s all good. I enjoy linking all my apps to Facebook so that everyone knows whenever I watch a movie, listen to a song, play a game or toast some bread.

Today, we live in the happy delusion that people actually care about every breath we take and every fart we make. If it keeps us happy and raises our self-esteem, why not, huh?

Indeed, why not.

But just remember not to believe everything you see in Facebook because someone could pretend to have watched an intellectual film just to appear intellectual, or another person could use someone else’s Netflix account to watch Prison Break while said someone else is supposed to be working hard on an essay.

But, still, all is good. I have scanned through Netflix quickly and not found any overly embarrassing films or TV programmes in there so Piers is welcome to knock himself out watching all the shows he possibly can because Netflix is like a TV buffet.

Anyway, the worst of my chicken pox is over now. I don’t even want to talk about it because it is the worst singular experience I’ve had in my life.

I am now trying my darnedest to catch up with my school work because I had to miss an entire week of classes, during which I was sick and miserable at home, at times fantasizing about rushing outside in the middle of the night to provoke random drunk students so that they would be inspired to stab me dead.

In the meantime, I have been honing my drawing skills on the new social game, Draw Something, which you can play on Apple and Android devices, and which you should because it’s fun. Download it and add me via Facebook or e-mail so we can play together and I can traumatise you with my crappy drawings.

Can’t stay to chat now. I have just finished writing a 5,000-word essay but I have one more to write, the contents of which were taught when I was absent from school.

Hoorah.

Have a good March and be as mad as a March hare!

Yes, the unbelievable has happened. I have contracted chicken pox.

To get it at this stage of my life! Even Piers is laughing at me saying I’m so cute-obsessed that even the diseases I get have to be cute.

What rubbish? There is nothing cute about chicken pox, I told him, for it is the ugliest, most evil disease. But he argued that only little children get it usually, therefore it’s cute.

Why is it happening to me, then? What the hell, you stupid poxes?

It’s like these Chickenpox-men from outer space have decided to land on my body to have a picnic. They’re celebrating some alien festival by having a week-long party and the whole bloody colony is invited.

At first, they send a small expedition team of maybe five to test the water, so to speak. These brave pioneers, upon finding the land fertile and the water fresh and unpoisoned, ring home eagerly to mobilise the rest of the colony.

They start coming in droves, the quickest ones getting to pick choice spots around the body. But there are plenty of good spots to go around, so there is no need to fight. The whole body is an endless field of fun and sunshine all for the taking. They even bring camping equipment to make it a nice holiday.

“Look, Ted, let’s set up our tents next to the navel. We can play bouncing castle in it after our picnic!”

Ted and his friend are soon joined by more friends, who set up more tents and mats around haphazardly. It’s a celebration, folks! Come, have fun and don’t worry about anything! Bring your old, ailing grandparents and newborn babies, too, why not? The more the merrier!

And then, inevitably, some of them wander up to the face.

“Come quick, Amy, I have found us the perfect lookout point for our picnic! The view up there is gorgeous!”

While Amy is swooning at her oh-so-romantic beau, my brain is going, “No, nooooooooooo. Anywhere but my nose!”

Or my cheeks, for the matter.

Or my whole bloody face, you poxy vermin!

But the Chickenpox-men (and -women) don’t care. The whole point of their existence is to have a bloody picnic on my body and face. They just plonk themselves right down anywhere they like and then text their friends to hurry up and join in the fun.

Between the crazy itch and the disfigurement (and the fear that, if I so much as sneezed the wrong way, the disfigurement would become permanent), I am finding it hard to keep my sanity.

My flu isn’t getting any better after one whole week of holing myself up at home and surviving on oatmeal and honey drinks. I haven’t gotten much quality sleep, what with the painful throat, coughing, sore intestines (from coughing), blocked nose and my chronic neck pains.

And stupid university students who walk past the apartment every night to go to the bars and clubs in the town centre.

These nincompoops are worse than the Chickenpox-men because I know the Chickenpox-men will soon get tired of revelling and go home to Chickenpox Land.

These university students are there night after night, year after year. There’s a large university hostel near my apartment, so that’s where they come from. No matter what day it is, no matter what unearthly time of the night, they’re outside my window singing drunken songs at the top of their voices.

Sometimes they don’t just walk past. Sometimes they stick around the carpark just across my apartment and hold ear-popping rock concerts.

I am not exaggerating. This morning, Thursday, 4:10 am, group of blokes singing in unison loud enough to wake the dead. The ones who can’t sing are laughing their asses off, trying to drown the singing with their laughter, but it’s a tough fight.

This goes on every night between 11 pm and 6 am, with different groups of students streaming past every so often. Nobody has put a stop to this for goodness knows how long despite the fact that there are like 30 affected apartments between the hostel and the city of sin.

I don’t know why. There’s even a police station smack in the middle of the path, but I guess the police knock off work at 5 pm like everyone else does in this country.

I can understand the fun of drunken romps, but have none of these people yet realised that they’ve been doing it in a residential area, which apartments are stood out in the open right in their faces?

The amount of partying these kids do is unbelievable. I mean, never mind their studies, they can flunk their asses big time and live on government welfare for the rest of their lives, but what about their livers?

Oh, yeah, healthcare is free in this country so that’s covered, too.

I guess there is no reason not to party yourself to your grave, then.

Piers and I have been talking about moving out to a nice big house some time in the future and leasing this apartment out, but I’d feel really bad for the future tenants who would have to put up with this insanity.

Oh well, at least they won’t be having chicken pox, too. That much one can be thankful for.

Not for me. I thought I’d already gone through hell week (with the flu) but now it’s beginning all over again, meaner and poxier.